Forrester, Jay W., "System Dynamics as a Foundation for Pre-College Education", 1990

System Dynamics as a
Foundation for Pre-College Education

Jay W. Forrester
System Dynamics Group
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

April 10, 1990

Abstract: Educational systems are serving poorly. The public response is apt to
call for more of what is already not working, rather than seeking fundamentally
new and more effective approaches to education. Promising new approaches are
now being successfully demonstrated—system dynamics as a framework for giving
cohesion and meaning to individual facts, and “learner-directed learning” to
harness the creativity, curiosity, and energy of young people. Together these
reverse two fundamental roadblocks in traditional education. System dynamics
reverses the educational sequence where deadening years of learning facts precede
the use of those facts. Systems thinking through computer simulation introduces
synthesis (putting it all together) based on facts that even elementary school students
already have gleaned from life. Learner-directed learning reverses the process of a
teacher's lecturing facts at resistant students; learners take the leadership in
exploration, information gathering, and creating a unity out of their educational
experiences with the "teacher" acting as guide and participating learner and as a
resource person.
368 System Dynamics '90

Education in the United States is generally recognized as serving less and less
well in meeting modern needs. Failures in education appear in the form of
corporate executives who cannot cope with the complexities of growth and
competition, government leaders who are at a loss to understand economic and
political change, and a public that supports inappropriate responses to immigration
pressures, changing international conditions, rising unemployment, the drug
culture, governmental reform, and inadequacies in education.

There is danger that growing criticism of U.S. education will focus attention
on incorrect diagnoses and ineffective treatments. The weakness in education arises
not so much from poor teachers as from the inappropriateness of the material that is
being taught. Students are stuffed with facts but without having a frame of
reference for making those facts relevant to the complexities of life. Responses to
educational deficiencies are apt to result in demands for still more of what is not
working—for more science, humanities, and social studies in an already
overcrowded curriculum—rather than moving toward a common foundation that
pulls all fields of study into a unity that becomes mutually reinforcing and far easier
to teach and to understand.

Source of Educational Ineffectiveness

Education is fragmented. Social studies, physical science, biology, and other
subjects are taught as if they were inherently different from one another even
though dynamic behavior in each rests on the same underlying concepts. For
example, the dynamic structure that causes a pendulum to swing is identically the
same as the core structure that causes employment and inventories to fluctuate in a
product-distribution system and in economic business cycles. Humanities are taught
without relating the dynamic sweep of history to similar behaviors on a shorter
time scale that the student can experience in a week or a year.
System Dynamics ’90 369

High schools teach a curriculum from which a student is expected to
synthesize a perspective and framework for understanding the social and physical
environment. But that framework is never explicitly taught. A student is expected
to create a unity from the fragments of the educational experience. But the teachers
themselves have seldom achieved that unity.

Missing from most education is a direct treatment of the time dimension.
What causes change from the past to the present and the present to the future? How
do present decision-making policies determine the future toward which we are
moving? How are the lessons of history to be interpreted to the present? Why are
so many corporate, national and personal decisions ineffective in achieving their
intended objectives? Such understanding will seldom be revealed by conventional
educational programs. Answers to such questions about how things change through
time lie in the dynamic behavior of social, personal, and physical systems. Dynamic
behavior, common to all systems, can be taught as such. It can be understood.

In education we have been teaching static snapshots of the real world. But the
world's problems are dynamic. The human mind grasps pictures, maps, and static
relationships in a wonderfully effective way. But in systems of interacting
components that change through time, the human mind is a poor simulator of
behavior. Mathematically speaking, even a simple social system can represent a
tenth-order, highly nonlinear, differential equation. Mathematicians can not solve
the general case for such an equation, and no citizen, manager or politician can
reliably judge its behavior by intuition. Yet, even a junior high school student with
a personal computer and coaching in dynamic behavior can advance remarkably far
in understanding such complex systems.

Education faces the challenge of undoing and reversing much that a person
has learned by observation of simple dynamic situations. Simple experiences in
everyday life deeply ingrain lessons that are deceptively misleading in dealing with
more complex social systems. For example, from buming our fingers on a hot
370 System Dynamics '90

stove, we learn the lesson that cause and effect are closely related in both time and
space—we burn our fingers here and now when we move too close to the stove.
Almost all understandable experiences reinforce the belief that causes are obviously
related to results. But in more complex systems, the cause of a difficulty is usually
far distant in both time and space—the cause is back in time and lies in a different
part of the system from the point where the symptoms appear. To make matters
even more misleading, a complex feedback system usually presents what we have
come to expect, an apparent cause that lies close in time and space to the symptom,
whereas that apparent cause is usually only a coincident symptom through which
there is little leverage for producing improvement. Education does little to prepare
students for living successfully when simple, understandable lessons so often point
in exactly the wrong direction in the complex real world.

Cornerstones for a More Effective Education

Two mutually reinforcing developments now promise a learning process that
can enhance breadth, depth, and insight in education—system dynamics and
learner-directed learning.

System Dynamics

During the last 30 years, the field of system dynamics has been building a
more effective basis than previously existed for understanding change and
complexity. The field rests on three foundations:

1. The growing knowledge of how feedback loops, containing information
flows, decision making, and action, control all change in systems—stability,
goal seeking, stagnation, decline, and growth. We are surrounded in
everything we do or observe by feedback systems. A feedback process is one
in which action affects the condition of a system and that changed condition
System Dynamics '90 371

affects future action. Human interactions, home life, politics, management
processes, environmental changes, and biological activity all are surrounded
and governed by feedback loops that connect action to result to future action.

2. The use of digital computers, now primarily personal computers, to
simulate the behavior of systems that are too complex to attack with
conventional mathematics, verbal descriptions, or graphical methods. High
school students, using today's computers, can deal with concepts and dynamic
behavior that only a few years ago were restricted to the realm of advanced
research laboratories.!

3. The realization that most of the world's knowledge about structures that
give rise to dynamic behavior resides in people's heads. The social sciences
have relied too much on measured data and, as a consequence, have failed to
make adequate use of the data base on which the world runs—the information
gained from living experience, apprenticeship, and participation. Junior
high and high school students already have a vast amount of operating
information about individuals, families, communities, and schools that can
become the basis for accelerated learning about the dynamics of social,
business, economic, and environmental behavior.

The system dynamics approach has been successfully applied to behavior in
corporations, internal medicine, fisheries, psychiatry, energy supply and pricing,
economic behavior, urban growth and decay, environmental stresses, population
expansion and aging, training of managers, and education of primary and high
school students.

1 For most work at the pre-college level, STELLA™ on Macintosh computers is easiest to use.
The Academic User's Guide to STELLA™ is an excellent text book for system dynamics as
well as for the software (Richmond, et al 1987). For more advanced professional use,
DYNAMO™ is available for IBM and compatible computers (Pugh 1983, and 1986). Several
other software packages exist for system dynamics modeling, some with special attention to use
in secondary schools.
372 System Dynamics ’90

In pre-college education, Nancy Roberts first demonstrated system dynamics
as an organizing framework at the fifth and sixth grade levels (Roberts 1975). Her
work (summarized in Roberts 1978) showed the advantage of reversing the
traditional educational sequence that normally progresses through five steps from
first learning facts to step four on analysis and step five of synthesis. Most students
in our educational system never reach that fifth step of synthesis. Synthesis—
putting it all together—can come much earlier in the educational process. By the
time students reach junior high school they already possess a wealth of facts about
family, interpersonal relations, community, and school. They are ready fora
framework into which the facts can be fitted. Unless that framework, or structure,
is provided, teaching more and more facts loses its significance.

In his penetrating discussion of the learning process, Bruner states, "the most
basic thing that can be said about human memory... is that unless detail is placed
into a structured pattern, it is rapidly forgotten" (Bruner 1963, p. 24). For most
purposes, such a structure is inadequate if it is only a static framework. The
structure should show the dynamic significance of the detail—how the details are
connected, how they influence one another, and how past behavior and future
outcomes are influenced by decision-making policies and their interconnections.

System dynamics can provide that dynamic framework to give meaning to
detail, facts sources of information, and human responses. Such a dynamic
framework provides a common foundation beneath mathematics, physical science,
social studies, biology, history, and even literature.2

In spite of the potential power of system dynamics, it could well be
ineffective if introduced alone into a traditional educational setting in which
students passively receive lectures. System dynamics can not be acquired as a

2 Thave recently been moved to add literature to this list after reading about the powerful impact
on students from a computer simulation of the psychological dynamics in Shakespeare's
Hamlet (Hopkins 1990).
System Dynamics '90 373

spectator sport any more than one can become a good basketball player by merely
watching the game. There must be active participation for the dynamic paradigm to
be absorbed, internalized and made a part of a person's controlling mental models.
Learner-directed learning offers a participative process that has demonstrated
promise of providing the bridge that connects systems concepts to systems thinking.

Learner-Directed Learning

Listening to lectures is for students a deadening, nonparticipating,
undemocratic, authoritarian process. It has the disadvantages we normally
associate with authoritarian governments. The recipients of such lectures naturally
resist authority, they sabotage the process, and their rebellion defeats the best
intentions of the educational system.

“Leamer-directed learning,” is a term I heard indirectly from Mrs. Kenneth
Hayden of Ideals Associated. It shifts the role of teacher from being a dispenser of
knowledge for students as passive receptors to a mode where small teams of
students work together to help one another and the "teacher" becomes a learning
participant acting as guide and resource person, not as an authoritarian figure who
is dictating each step of the educational process.

Perhaps the best way to glimpse the learner-directed learning process it to
hear from a few of those who have first-hand experience:

From a "citizen champion" engaged in drawing all participants in the school
enterprise together in their thinking about a new kind of education, "the use of

computers in the classroom (not in a computer lab) has, for us in Tucson,

3 Ideals Associated, P.O. Box 36988, 2570 Avenida de Maria, Tucson, AZ 85740-691288 is a
very small foundation that for two decades has fostered an approach to learning that enlists
students themselves in active participation that contributes to the momentum of the educational
process.
374 System Dynamics '90

resulted in a very unique learning environment... (students) learn what they need
to know as the teacher guides them in conducting a simulation in class. They
work in groups, two or three to a computer—certainly not one per computer—
and thereby help one another. Dr. Barry Richmond says that this situation, in
effect, multiplies the number of teachers by the number of students. Before
doing a simulation the students spend several class periods gathering information
about the topic; they take notes during lectures, learn about a library and read
references, and, working as a group, plan the simulation. By working this way
Draper's students do not merely try to remember the material for a test but
actually have to use it in a project simulating real life situations. This has led us to
identify a new teaching paradigm which we define as "SYSTEM THINKING
with LEARNER DIRECTED LEARNING." (Brown 1990)

From a teacher of 8th grade biology, "Since October 1988 our classrooms
have undergone an amazing transformation. Not only are we covering more
material than just the required curriculum, but we are covering it faster (we will
be through with the year's curriculum this week and will have to add more
material to our curriculum for the remaining 5 weeks) and the students are
learning more useful material than ever before. "Facts" are now anchored to
meaning through the dynamic relationships they have with each other. In our
classroom students shift from being passive receptacles to being active learners.
They are not taught about science per se, but learn how to acquire and use
knowledge (scientific and otherwise). Our jobs have shifted from dispensers of
information to producers of environments which allow students to learn as much
as possible.

"We now see students come early to class (even early to school), stay after
the bell rings, work through lunch and work at home voluntarily (with no
assignment given). When we work on a systems project—even when the
students are working on the book research leading up to system work—there are
essentially no motivation/discipline problems in our classrooms." (Draper 1989)
System Dynamics '90 375

From a teacher of literature to high-school juniors in a slower-track group
where previously few of the students had shown even a slight interest in anything
like a play by Shakespeare, "(when we used) a STELLA model which analyzed
the motivation of Shakespeare's Hamlet to avenge the death of his father in
HAMLET... The students were engrossed throughout the process... The
amazing thing was that the discussion was completely student dominated. For
the first time in the semester, I was not the focal point of the class. I did not have
to filter the information from one student back to the rest of the class. They were
talking directly to each other about the plot events and about the human responses
being stimulated. They talked to each other about how they would have reacted
and how the normal person would react. They discussed how previous events
and specific personality characteristics would affect the response to each piece of
news, and they strove for precision in the values they assigned for the power of
each event. My function became that of listening to their viewpoints and entering
their decisions into the computer. It was wonderful! It was as though the use of
precise numbers to talk about psychological motives and human responses had
given them power, had given them a system to communicate with. It had given
them something they could handle, something that turned thin air into solid
ground. They were directed and in control of learning, instead of my having to
force them to keep their attention on the task." (Hopkins 1990)

The Present Status

The field of system dynamics is developing rapidly, but does not yet have
widespread public visibility. The international System Dynamics Society was
formed about five years ago. Its membership has grown rapidly to some 300.
Annual system dynamics international meetings have been held for fifteen years
with the most recent in Norway, Colorado, Spain, China, California and Germany.
System dynamics books and papers are regularly translated into many languages
including Russian, Japanese, and Chinese.
376 System Dynamics '90

After 30 years of development, several dozen books have been written on the
theory, concepts, and applications of system dynamics. Some have exerted
surprising public impact. The Limits to Growth book (Meadows, et al 1972),
dealing with population, industrialization, hunger, and pollution, has been
translated into some 30 languages and has sold over three million copies. Such
wide-spread readership of a book based on computer modeling testifies to a public
longing to understand how present actions lead into future difficulties and
successes.

System dynamics was developed at M.LT. The first leaders in the field were
educated there. But competence is now appearing in many places. Talent exists on
which to build a new kind of educational system.

But, system dynamics is so broadly applicable throughout physical, social,
biological, and political systems that the small number of experts have been thinly
dispersed over a wide spectrum without yet generating a strong critical mass in any
one area. So it is with the application of system dynamics to pre-college education.
Initial work is under way in several places, but progress has not yet reached a point
where it has clearly demonstrated a self-sustaining momentum in the absence of a
strong input from a person broadly knowledgeable about system dynamics.

Several high schools, curriculum-development projects, and colleges are
beginning to build study units in mathematics, science, social studies, and history
around a system dynamics core. These have not yet reached the point of becoming a
fully integrated educational structure.

The most advanced experiment in the United States in bringing system
dynamics and learner-directed learning together into a more powerful educational
environment appears to be in the Catalina Foothills School District of Tucson,
Arizona. In that community the necessary building blocks for successful
educational innovation seem to be coming together. These involve fundamental
System Dynamics '90 377

new concepts of education, a receptive community, talented teachers who are
willing to try unfamiliar ideas and who are at ease in the nonauthoritarian
environment of learner-directed learning, an understanding and encouraging
school administration, a supportive school board, and a "citizen champion" who
without a personal vested interest in the outcome except for a desire to facilitate
improvement in education has helped by inspiring teachers, finding funding,
arranging for computers, and above all facilitating convergence of the political
processes in the community.

Some other countries (Norway, Germany, Japan, and China) appear to be
moving ahead in using system dynamics as a foundation for designing a more
powerful educational system below the college level. Even though this new basis
for education was developed in the United States, there is, as has earlier occurred in
technological developments, a possibility that countries in Europe and the Orient
may advance more quickly to effective use.

The Future

Over a period of several decades, we can expect an improved kind of
educational system to evolve even without special action. But should we wait? The
growing severity of corporate, economic, social, political, and international
difficulties demonstrates an acute need for better understanding. Aggressive action
can lead sooner to a society with keener insights into the reasons for current
shortcomings and how to evolve more effective social systems for the future.

The foundation now exists for a far more effective educational program. But
a vast amount of work is still needed to build on that foundation. Adequate
educational materials are yet to be developed. One book exists aimed especially at
high schools (Roberts, et al 1983). Other introductory system dynamics books are
378 System Dynamics ‘90

available.4 Nevertheless, the available published material does not yet convey the
background, STELLA models, related teacher-support materials, and guidance on
teaching methods that already exist in scattered places in the work of teachers who
are pioneering in systems thinking and learner-directed learning.

Courageous and forceful action is needed and justified. Such action might
best be led by private individuals rather than waiting for public political
organizations to initiate innovation. Private support can operate with a freedom
and a dedication of purpose that is not possible with the bureaucratic processes of
government.

For most rapid progress, two kinds of activity are needed. One would be a
diverse network of schools (starting with a few and expanding as progress justifies)
that are experimenting with how best to introduce system dynamics and learner-
directed learning into classrooms. The other activity would be a center serving as a
focal point to maintain communication between the network of schools, expand the
presently available training seminars for teachers, assist teachers in preparing their
new materials for wider dissemination, and assist in maintaining the integrity and
real-world practicality of the systems content of the emerging curriculum.

The effort will take substantial time. It must be planned and funded for
adequate continuity. Both the network of schools and the focal-point center should
have guaranteed funding for a decade or more. Additional funding will be needed
for related activities in publishing, trial teaching, and retraining of teachers.

Unless the initial plan provides a time horizon long enough for effective
launching of a radically improved process of education, it will not be possible to
attract the necessary quality and breadth of talent. In addition to a core of experts in

4 Although not written specifically for pre-college use, the following books can be helpful:
(Forrester 1961, 1968, 1969, and 1973; Goodman 1974; and Richardson and Pugh 1981)
System Dynamics '90 379

system dynamics, there must be even larger groups that understand the related
aspects of a successful educational innovation— experienced teachers who
understand the problems and opportunities in class rooms, people with past success
in achieving improvement in education, those who can translate ideas into effective
teaching materials, and practical inputs on how to draw together the strength that
can come from mutual support from teachers, school administrators, school
boards, parents, concerned public, and state and national school officials.

The initial challenge is to pull together a group of citizens with the vision,
courage, financial resources, and concem for the long-term well-being of society
that would take a leadership role in creating the working groups for a far more
effective educational system than is otherwise likely to evolve.

References

Brown, Gordon S. (1990). The Genesis of the System Thinking Program at the Orange Grove
Middle School, Tucson, Arizona. Personal report. 6301 N. Calle de Adelita, Tucson,
AZ 85718. March 1. 8 pp.

Bruner, Jerome S. (1963). The Process of Education. New York: Vintage Books.

Draper, Frank. (1989). Letter to Jay Forrester. personal communication, Orange Grove Junior
High School, 1911 E. Orange Grove Rd., Tucson, AZ 85718. May 2.

Forrester, Jay W. 1961. Industrial Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 464 pp.

Forrester, Jay W. 1968. Principles of Systems (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press,
391 pp.

Forrester, Jay W. 1969. Urban Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 285 pp.

Forrester, Jay W. 1973. World Dynamics (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 144 pp.

Goodman, Michael R. 1974. Study Notes in System Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Productivity
Press, 388 pp.
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Hopkins, Pamela Lee. 1990. Classroom Implementation of STELLA to Illustrate Hamlet.
Description of computer model and classroom experience. Desert View High School,
4101 East Valencia Rd., Tucson, AZ 85706. March. 7 pp.

Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III.
(1972). The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books. 205 pp.

Pugh, Alexander L., II. 1983. Dynamo User's Manual. Computer program (IBM mainframe).
(6th ed.). Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 290 pp.

Pugh, Alexander L., III. (1986). Professional DYNAMO Plus Reference Manual. Software
instruction manual. 5 Lee St, Cambridge, MA: Pugh-Roberts Associates.

Richardson, George P., and Alexander L. Pugh III. 1981. Introduction to System Dynamics
Modeling with DYNAMO . Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 413 pp.

Richmond, Barry, Steve Peterson, and Peter Vescuso. 1987. An Academic User's Guide to
STELLA. Macintosh computer program, 13 Dartmouth Highway, Lyme, NH 03768:
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Roberts, Nancy. 1975. A Dynamic Feedback Approach to Elementary Social Studies: A Prototype
Gaming Unit. Thesis, Boston University (available from University Microfilms, Ann
Arbor, Michigan)

Roberts, Nancy. 1978. Teaching Dynamic Feedback Systems Thinking: an Elementary View.
Management Science, 24(8), 836-43.

Roberts, Nancy, David Andersen, Ralph Deal, Michael Garet, and William Shaffer. 1983.
Introduction to Computer Simulation: A System Dynamics Modeling Approach.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 562 pp.

Revised and extended from D4018-1